Tuesday, January 27, 2009

A number of things conspired to breaking down my iTunes loathing. First was Apple dropping DRM on iTunes, and a couple of other hints recently that they've cleaned up their act on PC iTunes interlockisuckness. The kicker though was the slow disintegration of my cheapass MP3 player finally made it useless for a potential 5 hr cleaning stint at work.

The MP3 player started out Ok. 1/3 the price of an iPod touch with virtually all the features. It was also expandable through a MiniSD port, std 3.5 mm jack for speakers and a pure file system for organizing music, videos or data. There were some things that came to light after playing with it though:

- No bookmarking: This was a big one. I had picked it up almost exclusively for podcasts, but every time it powered down it lost the place in the mp3. For songs that would be Ok, but in hour-long podcasts it was a right royal pain in the ass. In the 10 minute trip home I would sometimes spend 2 minutes ffwding to the right spot. Added to that the touch screen was a little too touchy. If you slightly lifted your finger off the ffwd button and the car bumped or something, you'd tap the ffwd button again and advance to the next song! Aarrgh!!@! After a couple of months I finally found a solution by splitting the podcasts into 10 minute chunks. I'd then be pretty close to one chunk per trip.

- Sloppy controls: Added to the Ffwd button unpleasantries, there was very little tactile feedback on the touchscreen or display. Sometimes you were certain you'd pressed a button and it wouldn't do anything, other times it was way too sensitive. There would be no way you could use it without looking at it, which leads to ..

- Poor screen visibility: In bright sunlight the screen is impossible to see. Even shading the screen barely makes a difference. Added to that, the screen gets smudged from touching it (duh).

- USB dodgyness: On the same USB port it would work sometimes and not others. At least it didn't need a CD to work. Never quite figured out what state caused the error or (better yet) what would definitely work.

- Poor assembly: After ~6 months the metal strip around the player came adrift leaving a rather tacky dishevelled look. The 3.5mm jack also lost amplification somehow. You could still hear it fine through the internal speaker, or through the car audio system by cranking it up, but headphones were useless.

The amp problem was the death knell when I needed it for cleaning. I tried through the internal speaker from my pocket, and then cradling it like a mobile phone, but I knew it just wasn't going to last the distance. I dumped the tools and headed into town to pick up a replacement.

I'd seen the nano's around school, but hadn't really paid attention to them. I really just needed something for podcasts and the size looked right. When I saw it in the store I was surprised how thin it was and that it actually had a proper screen. I knew it had advanced past the original iPod bullet list, but wasn't expecting a screen that could do video. There really wasn't much of a debate about size, the bigger the better, and 16Gb actually opened up the possibility of moving my whole collection to it. The tougher choice was the colour. I'd have loved a dark green one, but the green was a lighter stand-out colour you'd see on a VeeDub. Looked nice, but not my style. The grey was Ok. Not inspirational, but functional.

Now the big test: Putting on iTunes. We had previously loaded iTunes on some of the machines at work for podcast creation, so it went on relatively easy (even picking up some tests from my profile). Podcast searching through iTunes is still abysmal, but at least it's all in one place. I tried to load in some of my older mp3 podcasts, but iTunes failed to acknowledge them as such and dumped them in with the rest of the music. Ahh yes, "my way or else". With little investment into either the current collection or the state of the iPod I managed to fiddle enough to get my main TWiT feeds onto it and a couple of new experiments. With at least 3 hours a day opened up for listening it was going to get a workout.

Initial reactions to the clickwheel was that it, too, offered highly sensitive pickup sometimes and not others. Quickly scrolling down the list is fine, but passing the one you wanted and reversing just one song / track would invariably mean reversing 2. This lead to a comical dance to and fro over the target track. After using it for another week it's either settled down or I'm getting used to how it wants me to operate. I'm guessing the latter.

At home I set up another iTunes station on my main box and went to work figuring out how to sync to 2 machines without wiping out my entire collection off the iPod. It certainly looks easier to do now than before, but is still an uphill battle than just naively syncing to one machine automatically.

Next up were a number of Audiobooks ripped to mp3. On first attempt they came across into the music section like the older podcasts, but after some googling on outdated techniques I found that all you need to do is change the media type on all the files to "audiobook"

While there it's worth ticking the bookmarking option as well as skipping from playlists. I'm pretty sure the media type should preclude it from normal playlists now, but I didn't test it out. There also was a wierd one where Johnathon Coulton's Thing a Week podcast all came over as podcasts rather than being integrated into the song list. Changing these checkboxes on those songs made them visible to playlists regardless of the podcast flag, so I'm guessing the same could be said for audiobooks.

For a week I went to town on the podcasts, subscribing to over 15 streams to get the ball rolling. I'd mostly have a couple spare as well as the Audiobooks to better match my listening mood. I'm glad I can use the headphones again too. I picked them up when passing through Japan on my way to last year's WCG grand final in Seattle and the retractable nature of them has been awesome compared to the mess of cords in my bum bag.

I also made my first purchase, Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog. I'd watched it at Andrew's place and really wanted Sandy to watch it, as well as have it available to indoctrinate others. Actually the screen does a remarkable job for watching it. Very nice even in daylight. Now that I've rewatched it several times I can't get the songs out of my head. There's something inherently more catchy and repeatable about musicals than if it were a normal TV series like Firefly.

So finally some awesome moments from Doogie .. err .. Dr. Horrible. I like his expressions when he's not talking. Great timing.